the whole-body tragedy
by TolkienGirl
Summary: "PTSD is a whole-body tragedy, an integral human event of enormous proportions with massive repercussions." - Susan Pease Banitt (Sam suffers from the repercussions of torture, mental and physical, in the wake of 12x02. Set after 12x04. Hurt/comfort, no slash, please heed warnings.)


**A/N: So. This is rated M. Not because I've gone off the deep-end and started writing lurid things. Haha. No worries. Instead...well, here's the thing. I was really struck by the fact that Sam was very disturbingly violated by the dreadful Toni Bevell through her dream-potion and I thought that it was an important subject to explore through fic, also tying it in with Sam's other experiences of having people overtake his body/mind/etc. without his consent.**

 **This is rated M for discussion of a very sensitive and serious subject from a couple (non-explicit, but occasionally suggestive) perspectives and because I dropped an f-bomb in that context. This is a first-time use of such language to me and I have no intention of repeating it with any frequency. So I hope that this fic does nothing to offend at any level.**

 **So, in short: warnings for strong language, mild language, discussion/flashbacks of noncon, and also torture/possession. And drug use. I PROMISE it's hurt/comfort.**

 **Also, as always, no slash.**

Sam dreams of Magda that night, feels some point of connection to the singularly freeing act of climbing the ribbed metal steps of a Greyhound bus, headed _away_.

He hopes she'll take him up on calling, hopes that she won't fade away into the grey mist of time and distance, grappling with the demons that were forced on her and the voices that are hers by nature.

It's been a while since Sam's thought of the voices and visions that used to tangle in his dreams, vine-like, sometimes creeping into day. It's been a while, because Sam is good at stretching out the _whiles_ , coping and reaching. Things are rarely good, but it's only when they get better that Sam lets himself get worse.

So he waits until Dean has started whistling softly in the mornings again, waits until Dean texts Mom when he thinks Sam isn't looking but does bring her up in conversation sometimes, waits until they can _breathe_.

And then Sam crashes. It speaks more to his own growing up, he thinks, than Dean's long-held dream of a perfect family. Because Sam was overcome with something beautiful, seeing Mom, meeting Mom—but it didn't feel like anything he knew. He wasn't going to let his guard down around Mom, wasn't going to show the rough and raw edges.

Wasn't going to sit down and count the scars he can see and the ones he can't.

Sam waits until things are almost normal, and then he's on his knees in the bathroom, throwing up.

He must have lost track of time, if not fully passed out, because the next thing he knows he's got cool tiles pressing patchwork against his forehead, Dean's hand, familiar and heavy on his neck, and Dean's voice in his ear. "Sam—Sam— _Sammy_ ," Dean pleads, just like Dean's being saying since Sam was too young to remember.

"'M fine," Sam gets out, because _fine_ means something different to them than it does for everyone else in the world. "Just some…bug. Something."

It's more like _something_. He jerks his foot reflexively—Castiel doesn't take away _phantom_ pain, irrational hurts—and his hands are shaking and there's vomit on his chin and probably in his hair.

Sam is thirty-three years old, and two days ago he was the one leading his brother through yet another valley of shadow, until they both could see the light.

"Can you stand up?" Dean asks. His voice is gruff because Dean's voice is always gruff, gruff from whiskey and being growly and also from forty years in Hell, though they don't talk about that much. But it's a soft kind of gruff, and Sam leans his weight on his brother for just a moment.

"I can stand," he says, forcing himself to be upright. "I'm serious, Dean. It's just some kind of flu. Nothing freaky."

"Then you're going to get your Gigantor ass in bed and have some soup."

"I just puked, Dean." It is a special talent of Sam's that he can still make himself sound assertive and knowledgeable when he feels like absolute crap. "I don't want soup."

He does go to his room, though, and when Dean comes back with a mug of broth, he's sitting on the edge of his bed.

Dean puts the broth on Sam's nightstand and hands him a washcloth. "For your face," he says, like Sam doesn't know.

Sam sits in silence while Dean just stands there. There are many ways he could tell this, and maybe he shouldn't tell it at all. Sam _is_ a Winchester through-and-through, after all; and sometimes he'd rather lock all the ugliness in eternal darkness.

In a cage, and ah, _there_ is one for irony.

"He came in here," he says. A strange place to start, and yet, perhaps not. Because there was no time, no time at all with Amara and the dying sun and _Dean, bright with the light of every soul_ —it didn't matter, then, that Lucifer walked past Sam without so much as a moment's notice and yet picked his room above the rest.

Because Lucifer, even when he has no more use for Sam, has always made it very clear that he can take what is Sam's, take his room, his dreams, his freedom. If it is to his purpose to make a sport of it, he will. If it is to his purpose to treat Sam like an ant who escapes the boot or does not, all by imperial chance, he will.

The room was Sam's, and now, like everything else, it was shared and stolen in an invisible way.

"Lucifer?" Dean asks, because Dean's not inside Sam's head, obviously, and has no reason to follow Sam's tortured thoughts.

"Yeah."

"Son of a bitch."

"Just another in a long line," Sam says wearily, and he can't bear to look up at Dean for this next part. It's crap therapy, sharing his feelings with acid roiling in his stomach, remembering how his room, his body, his mind have all been shared with the devil. But they've got a little piece of normality, and Sam has to use it up, has to scorch it like a fresh candlewick.

"What's that mean?" And to Dean's credit, he knows there's more, because Dean raised him right before the world ruined him in ways Dean couldn't stop—and so Dean knows that Sam likes to talk about his feelings. Or his long history of tragicomic violations. However they should be described.

"It means…" The first time was Meg, although ghost possessions and curses had happened now and again. But the first _real_ time was Meg, because it was personal. And after that the demon blood was his fault. So maybe Lucifer was too, and maybe it all is. Sometimes Sam is healthy and the bitterness becomes little more than a quirk in his smile, wisdom tempered firm and brave by pain. And sometimes it all just sucks. Scattered amongst these dark powers is the most ludicrous of all—Becky Rosen, and his wrists and ankles splayed and tied to bedposts, the most nonsensical farce, but the same fear.

 _It_ was _good, wasn't it?_ Toni Bevell's smooth voice oozes in the pits of his memory. _One little potion and you're quite the animal, Sam. I rather like it that way._

"She mindfucked me." It comes out quiet. The ugly word has no gloss of humor, of flippancy. "Literally. She gave me potion, and…enhanced interrogation. More persuasive. Made me dream—"

He can feel Dean's anger beside him even though Dean hasn't moved. Dean doesn't have to move. Dean, for all his macho pretended stoicism, radiates emotional fluctuations like his heart is something fundamental and atomic.

Sam's seen worse. It's worse, having your soul flayed particle by particle, and it's worse when a demon pours darkness into your fingertips but lets you feel each splatter of innocent blood, twisting your vocal chords into a laugh that is still somehow _yours_. Sam's seen worse.

But that doesn't make this better. It's still all so vivid, all so _his_ in a way that makes him sick all over again, how he can remember Toni Bevell's hot mouth on his neck, how his hands felt on her, and how he _wanted_ it.

Even demons can't do that. Even Lucifer didn't make him _want_ it.

"I'd have killed her." Dean says it, and he means it, and Sam's just not in the mood to lecture him on mercy, even though he let them let Toni Bevell go. Mostly he's just grateful that Dean _gets_ it, because sometimes it's hard to know what Dean will understand.

"I'll get over it," Sam promises, because it's been years, now, that he's tried to hold up the end of their fragile world. Since Dean got back from Hell, certainly. Maybe even before that. But Sam won't get over it. He'll just tuck it away into the box that keeps all those violations, the times when his body wasn't his and his mind wasn't his and sometimes they made him laugh and sometimes the pain was all he knew.

"When…" Dean isn't looking at him, is looking straight ahead instead, letting the chicken broth get cold and not even mentioning it. "A long time ago, I had to—there was a succubus, and Dad needed me to get close. Real close. You know." It's not like Dean to speak in veiled terms. Sam listens in perfect stillness. "Anyway," Dean says. "It's not the same. Not fun, or hot, or whatever. It's just…"

"Did you say anything about it?" Sam asks, though he knows the answer as well as he knows the scar on his hand.

"Dude, I was twenty. I just—I guess I thought it would be a good story someday. That's what I told myself." He shrugs. There are things, like suffering and degradation, that Dean can shrug off. There are other things, like Mom, that drop Dean like a bullet. "I don't think about it that much. It's not a huge thing. I've had worse. We both of have." He means hell, means watching them take apart your soul, means watching _you_ take apart your soul, and Sam knows it.

There's a little pause, and then Dean seems to remember the chicken broth. "Don't puke it up," he warns, like that will stop Sam's gag reflex. Then he pats Sam's bed like he doesn't know what to do with his hands. "You didn't deserve it," he says. "Even if something made you want it. Just like everything else we go through, it doesn't make it _you_ just because—"

 _Shall we go again?_

Sam shakes away her voice, her lips, her laughter when he woke. "I know," he says. Because he does. There is some part of him that always knows, but it never helps when things get better and he has time to be worse.

"Drink your broth," Dean orders, and he puts a quick hand on Sam's shoulder, a tight squeeze and release.

Sam does as he's told and then stretches out on his bed, trying not to think of Lucifer. Trying and failing not to think of Toni. "I keep remembering," he says, so softly that Dean might not even hear him.

But Dean does. "I'll sit here," Dean proffers stolidly, taking the chair with determination. "And you can talk if you want."

It's that, the simple assurance in few words—ever the fewest words when Dean has to approach acknowledgement of emotion—that lets Sam shut his eyes and rest.

Magda had it worse than he ever did, he thinks, bringing his thoughts full circle as he drifts off to sleep. There are always people who suffer more. Sam Winchester hasn't had a great life, but he has a great brother. That's more than most.

It makes things _better_ , even if it cannot make them _good_.


End file.
